Sessions at Web Directions South 2011 about JavaScript

Thursday 13th October 2011

After a lost decade in the wilderness, JavaScript is starting to change and evolve. We’ll look at CoffeeScript, a little language that compiles into JavaScript, providing concise ways to to write many common JavaScript patterns. We’ll cover syntactic and semantic pain points, polyfills, sugar, and how you can start experimenting with your own flavor of JS.

Would you like to learn how to organize your JavaScript applications so they can scale? Be able to write apps that support switching out Dojo or jQuery without rewriting a line of code? Application architecture is one of those aspects to development where minor problems can lead to major issues later on if it isn’t done right.

Developers writing client-side apps these days usually use a combination of MVC, modules, widgets, plugins and frameworks for theirs. Whilst this works great for apps that are built at a smaller-scale, what happens when your project really starts to grow?. In this talk, I’ll be presenting an effective set of design patterns for large-scale JavaScript application architecture that have previously been used at both AOL and Yahoo amongst others to develop scalable applications.

You’ll learn how to keep your application logic truly decoupled, build modules that can exist on their own independently so they can be easily dropped into other projects and future-proof your code in case you need to switch to a different DOM library in the future.

More and more as front-end developers we are presented with new challenges, with the explosion of the mobile web it has created a whole new territory. How do we test the vast array of devices out there? And what tools can help us make this a painless experience?

Testing web apps on mobile devices is a new challenge not yet fully explored. Let’s brush over the beginnings of web application testing and debugging and dive into current solutions for remote debugging. In this session we’ll cover what developers and browser vendors are doing to help tackle this problem, including some of the tools available to use today, and how some of these tools work internally and what the future may hold.

Friday 14th October 2011

Most jaw-dropping apps use multiple HTML5 APIs in creative ways, rather than a single API in isolation. In this session we will explore ways you can implement and combine HTML APIs such as websockets, web workers, local storage, and geolocation to make awesome web apps. Then just for fun we’ll look at how you can dish up something really special by throwing in ingredients like canvas, video and WebGL.

The Web is a purely magical substance that is built by us, web developers. How can it be that the web is totally technical, yet we all know some kids who we can call magicians of the Web. Some people believe that it’s all about skills, but Dmitry reckons it’s more about bravely, grit and a tiny bit of madness.

Do you want to change the Web, not just build it? Do you want to know the secret spells? Do you want to know the source of all this unlimited power? Come and find out.

Learn how to build high performance Internet and web applications with Node.js. In is session Tom Hughes-Croucher will demonstrate how to quickly build a high performance chat server using Node.js. This live coding exercise will provide a real insight into what it looks like to build a project in server-side Javascript. We will also cover how to deploy Node applications in production and look at just how far Node can really scale… A million connections and beyond?